Related parts - purpose unclear

[turist79]

Before coming to the Inventree i have tried different apps (Dolibarr, Odoo and Triton being all-in-one ERPs and Openboxes as WMS-only). I hope it will be Ok if i will from time to time drop some ideas based on features i have found useful in those apps.

One of things i miss in Inventree are Catalogs from Openboxes https://help.openboxes.com/article/319-create-a-product-catalog
They provide the way to group different items together with many to many relation (catalog can include many parts, one part can be referenced by many catalogs). Parts may be related to some specific project, equipment type etc.

In Inventree this may be achieved probably by creating separate category with virtual parts representing the catalogs and assigning all the required parts to it via "related parts". But i`m not sure that this wont backfire later when some functionality will be introduced for the related parts - so i would like to know if there are any plans regarding further development of related parts function?

The other thing from Openboxes is Product association https://help.openboxes.com/article/320-create-product-associations
Currently the use of related parts is somewhat limited in my opinion since there is even no simple description field for the relation which could provide the information on the naure of the relation. This looks like good place to keep more structured information about part relations.
Since substitutes are handled on BOM level, variants on the part level - so being accessory, related consumable (like thermal compaund for cpu//mainboard for example)?

[SchrodingersGat]

I hope it will be Ok if i will from time to time drop some ideas based on features i have found useful in those apps.

Yes, 100% - any input / suggestions / etc are always welcome :)

One of things i miss in Inventree are Catalogs from Openboxes

We support "tags" for parts, however currently these are not integrated into the interface. Tags can be used by plugins, but the concept has not been fully fleshed out and made available in the UI. I think that this would maybe achieve what you are looking for here? You can assign multiple "tags" to a particular part, and any other part which has a matching tag could be easily matched.

Currently the use of related parts is somewhat limited in my opinion since there is even no simple description field for the relation which could provide the information on the naure of the relation. This looks like good place to keep more structured information about part relations.

Adding a "description" field to the PartRelation table would be a good idea, I think. That's what you are going for here?